8 ms·

This is basically my feeling as well. I would prefer that we (at least in the U.S.) focus on making high school much much better, to the point that fewer people

This is basically my feeling as well. I would prefer that we (at least in the U.S.) focus on making high school much much better, to the point that fewer people have any need to go to college/university. And then, if we still need to, figure out what to do about University. (Saying this as someone who never finished college/university, largely because I was trying to pay for it myself and couldn't make it work.)

billytetrud 5y ago
Elementary and middle school is far more important than high school. The earlier you go, the more important it is.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  If we actually wanted to improve education in our schools, we would just finish desegregating them.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    How do we accomplish that, short of randomizing which school students are assigned to and then dealing with the transportation headache to make it happen? Schools continue to be segregated because of underlying socioeconomic realities; changing that is how we desegregate the schools, I don't know how we could feasibly reverse that causality.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      I think randomization plus weighting for geographic distance could work. The issue with busing was never the actual busing, and there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school. I lived in Cambridge, MA, and they have successfully desegregated their schools with a similar approach that kept transportation very low and remained a popular plan with most parents (75% approval income over $100k, ~95% approval income under $75k). In another place I lived, the top public magnet school was ~95% black. White parents pretty much universally refused to send their kids there, but would send their kids to a different magnet that was further away. The "underlying socioeconomic realities" are often overstated compared to the unfortunate, but big reason that we don't like to talk about, which is lots of parents (to some extent, understandably) are afraid to send their kids to a school where they would be in the racial minority. Schools are now as segregated as they were in 1976, which represents a backtracking from the peak in 1988. That represents an erosion of will more than a vastly changed socioeconomic reality.
      - rootusrootus 5y ago
        > there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school. Ah, that is interesting. In my district (and state, AFAIK), school assignment is completely out of the hands of the parents, with some narrow exceptions. I fully admit to having a narrow view on this, my state is not especially diverse, with more than 75% white and 2% black. So most of our school segregation, if it's fair to call it that, is completely socioeconomic even if the students are largely the same race.
        billytetrud 5y ago
        We definitely need more choice in schools. Parents should be able to decide where there children go to school independently of where they live.
        whimsicalism 5y ago
        What do we do when choice conflicts? Say, if a black family wants to send their kid to local school in a predominately white neighborhood, and there is a limited capacity?
        billytetrud 5y ago
        Lottery
        whimsicalism 5y ago
        My guess is this approach would also be desegregating.
        billytetrud 5y ago
        Glad we agree : )
        5y ago
  - billytetrud 5y ago
    There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I think calling the second "finishing" the first is misleading. However, there is a huge problem in school funding. The fact that school funding is primarily local means that poor neighborhoods get bad schools. That is a huge problem. We definitely should make funding of schools more egalitarian. Eliminating local funding in favor of state funding would do a lot for the public school system I think. But I also think giving parents more choice in schooling would also be a big win.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      > However, there is a huge problem in school funding. School funding is actually not as inegalitarian as you might have been led to believe - federal & state funding usually makes up for the differences in property tax funding, we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. > There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I think calling the second "finishing" the first is misleading. The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations.
      - billytetrud 5y ago
        > we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. Source? I'm surprised to hear that. > The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations. I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black people to live near each other and go to schools with each other. People segregate themselves socially all the time, for better or worse, and it has nothing to do with the constitution. It would be incredibly dubious to suggest that forcing people to integrate socially would be an appropriate government action - especially if done over a long period of time.
        dnautics 5y ago
        https://www.asumag.com/research/top-10s/article/21126924/among-largest-districts-who-spends-the-most-per-pupil https://www.asumag.com/research/top-10s/article/21126924/amo... In the top spending districts there are two extremely good districts and the rest (esp. Baltimore and hawaii) are generally well known as terrible. LAUSD spent 18k/pupil, and Chicago spent 16k, both terrible districtd... Don't know what they are not on there Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that they cost so much. The common factor between these districts is rampant political corruption (Baltimore spent millions on a plasma-tv-for-hq scandal, la and NYC burn millions on lawsuits for not firing child rapists, etc)... Eliminating rubber rooms is finally coming to NYC:
Tarsul 5y ago
I read an interview[1] with the general secretary of German trade and he lamented that in Germany for many, many years the consensus was that more and more people had to study. Thias was also because the OECD said so, not just German politicans. He says we don't need so many people who go to university, and I wholeheartedly agree. And this is coming from Germany where the education system is a lot more forgiving than in the US/UK etc. (in that you don't need to study STEM to earn good money, and studies are cheap) But I think in the coming years there will be a lot of rethinking about these things. [1]https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-koepfen-stecken-bilder-die-nicht-der-realitaet-entsprechen-a-fe6a684c-07e7-4c0a-8b08-e0c22ea911c6 https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-k...
bluedino 5y ago
>> focus on making high school much much better Meanwhile we're lowering standards and just passing every kid we can, for 'fairness'
- TheTrotters 5y ago
  I wouldn't pooh pooh that. It's a tough problem for politicians, teachers, education activists and researchers. If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then you'd end up with clear racial disparities. I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But, based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with blacks at the bottom. It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards enough everyone will meet them. It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address them, not pretend that they don't exist and that incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.
  - ihsw 5y ago
    Self-selection has already lead to increased racial segregation, Asian and white students are already increasingly being put into private or charter schools. If we want to improve academic performance of students in predominantly black neighborhoods then we should aggressively remove disruptive students from classrooms regardless of race. An entire classroom is held back by a handful of students intent on raising hell and it does more harm towards ambitious young black boys and girls than any policies intent on solving "disparities." Disparities in outcome is not evidence of discrimination.
- baq 5y ago
  Not passing a kid sets them back 10 years of life (yeah I made up that number but it’s what I’d expect to happen when you end up in a negative feedback loop like this). Education doesn’t have a binary outcome.

billytetrud 5y ago

Elementary and middle school is far more important than high school. The earlier you go, the more important it is.

whimsicalism 5y ago
If we actually wanted to improve education in our schools, we would just finish desegregating them.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  How do we accomplish that, short of randomizing which school students are assigned to and then dealing with the transportation headache to make it happen? Schools continue to be segregated because of underlying socioeconomic realities; changing that is how we desegregate the schools, I don't know how we could feasibly reverse that causality.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    I think randomization plus weighting for geographic distance could work. The issue with busing was never the actual busing, and there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school. I lived in Cambridge, MA, and they have successfully desegregated their schools with a similar approach that kept transportation very low and remained a popular plan with most parents (75% approval income over $100k, ~95% approval income under $75k). In another place I lived, the top public magnet school was ~95% black. White parents pretty much universally refused to send their kids there, but would send their kids to a different magnet that was further away. The "underlying socioeconomic realities" are often overstated compared to the unfortunate, but big reason that we don't like to talk about, which is lots of parents (to some extent, understandably) are afraid to send their kids to a school where they would be in the racial minority. Schools are now as segregated as they were in 1976, which represents a backtracking from the peak in 1988. That represents an erosion of will more than a vastly changed socioeconomic reality.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      > there are plenty of places (like my hometown) where parents send their kids further out to ensure that they attend a school that is majority their race rather than the local neighborhood school. Ah, that is interesting. In my district (and state, AFAIK), school assignment is completely out of the hands of the parents, with some narrow exceptions. I fully admit to having a narrow view on this, my state is not especially diverse, with more than 75% white and 2% black. So most of our school segregation, if it's fair to call it that, is completely socioeconomic even if the students are largely the same race.
      - billytetrud 5y ago
        We definitely need more choice in schools. Parents should be able to decide where there children go to school independently of where they live.
        whimsicalism 5y ago
        What do we do when choice conflicts? Say, if a black family wants to send their kid to local school in a predominately white neighborhood, and there is a limited capacity?
        billytetrud 5y ago
        Lottery
        whimsicalism 5y ago
        My guess is this approach would also be desegregating.
        billytetrud 5y ago
        Glad we agree : )
        5y ago
- billytetrud 5y ago
  There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I think calling the second "finishing" the first is misleading. However, there is a huge problem in school funding. The fact that school funding is primarily local means that poor neighborhoods get bad schools. That is a huge problem. We definitely should make funding of schools more egalitarian. Eliminating local funding in favor of state funding would do a lot for the public school system I think. But I also think giving parents more choice in schooling would also be a big win.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > However, there is a huge problem in school funding. School funding is actually not as inegalitarian as you might have been led to believe - federal & state funding usually makes up for the differences in property tax funding, we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. > There's a difference between outlawing enforcement of segregation by law and enforcing laws requiring people to go to schools they may not want their kids to go to. I think calling the second "finishing" the first is misleading. The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations.
    - billytetrud 5y ago
      > we're often spending more $/kid at these bad schools. Source? I'm surprised to hear that. > The distinction you're making is between de jure segregation and de facto segregation, both of which are constitutional violations. I disagree. It is not a consitutional violation for black people to live near each other and go to schools with each other. People segregate themselves socially all the time, for better or worse, and it has nothing to do with the constitution. It would be incredibly dubious to suggest that forcing people to integrate socially would be an appropriate government action - especially if done over a long period of time.
      - dnautics 5y ago
        https://www.asumag.com/research/top-10s/article/21126924/among-largest-districts-who-spends-the-most-per-pupil https://www.asumag.com/research/top-10s/article/21126924/amo... In the top spending districts there are two extremely good districts and the rest (esp. Baltimore and hawaii) are generally well known as terrible. LAUSD spent 18k/pupil, and Chicago spent 16k, both terrible districtd... Don't know what they are not on there Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that they cost so much. The common factor between these districts is rampant political corruption (Baltimore spent millions on a plasma-tv-for-hq scandal, la and NYC burn millions on lawsuits for not firing child rapists, etc)... Eliminating rubber rooms is finally coming to NYC:

Tarsul 5y ago

I read an interview[1] with the general secretary of German trade and he lamented that in Germany for many, many years the consensus was that more and more people had to study. Thias was also because the OECD said so, not just German politicans. He says we don't need so many people who go to university, and I wholeheartedly agree. And this is coming from Germany where the education system is a lot more forgiving than in the US/UK etc. (in that you don't need to study STEM to earn good money, and studies are cheap) But I think in the coming years there will be a lot of rethinking about these things. [1]https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-koepfen-stecken-bilder-die-nicht-der-realitaet-entsprechen-a-fe6a684c-07e7-4c0a-8b08-e0c22ea911c6 https://www.spiegel.de/start/ausbildung-im-handwerk-in-den-k...

bluedino 5y ago

>> focus on making high school much much better Meanwhile we're lowering standards and just passing every kid we can, for 'fairness'

TheTrotters 5y ago
I wouldn't pooh pooh that. It's a tough problem for politicians, teachers, education activists and researchers. If you set high standards and allowed only those who pass them to advance to the next grade, graduate HS etc. then you'd end up with clear racial disparities. I don't want to get into a discussion about what's the cause of these disparities and who's fault they are. But, based on available data on e.g. SAT scores, we'd have Asian Americans doing the best, followed by whites, and with blacks at the bottom. It'd provoke a flurry of media debate and negative attention on everyone involved. These people cannot fix the problem itself, at least not fully and certainly not quickly. But they can change standards to make it look like everyone is doing well. After all if you lower standards enough everyone will meet them. It's a real problem and these incentives aren't going to change. Any solution will have to acknowledge and address them, not pretend that they don't exist and that incompetent or weak-minded politicians are to blame.
- ihsw 5y ago
  Self-selection has already lead to increased racial segregation, Asian and white students are already increasingly being put into private or charter schools. If we want to improve academic performance of students in predominantly black neighborhoods then we should aggressively remove disruptive students from classrooms regardless of race. An entire classroom is held back by a handful of students intent on raising hell and it does more harm towards ambitious young black boys and girls than any policies intent on solving "disparities." Disparities in outcome is not evidence of discrimination.
baq 5y ago
Not passing a kid sets them back 10 years of life (yeah I made up that number but it’s what I’d expect to happen when you end up in a negative feedback loop like this). Education doesn’t have a binary outcome.